Some readers have asked me why I’ve taken particular interest in Australia’s refugee prison scandal. For the past few months, I’ve written extensively about the prisons and the company, Serco, that runs the private detention system. Apart from having a personal connection to the story (I was able to visit the Villawood Detention Centre last [...]

It’s been a hell of a week at Citizen Radio (which you can hear by subscribing for free at wearecitizenradio.com) We talked full-body scanners and racial profiling, celebrated our 200TH EPISODE and interviewed Mother Jones‘ Kate Sheppard about environmental politics, Halliburton, and BP, and Daniel Burke about Australia’s refugee prisons. It’s time to call sabotage, [...]

The company that runs Australia’s refugee prisons has set its sights on an NHS hospital. Serco Health, along with another company, Circle Health, have bid for a contract to run Hinchingbrooke, a hospital in Cambridgeshire. If the deal goes through, this would be the first ever NHS hospital to be put into the hands of [...]

I recently wrote a column for Truthout about the refugee prisons in Australia detailing one of the facilities (Villawood) where a 36-year-old Fijian national named Josefa Rauluni committed suicide by leaping from a roof. (I nearly got tossed from the place because one of Serco’s employees saw I had scribbled “Fiji suicide” in my notes.) [...]

If this actually comes to pass, it’ll be very good news: In a major policy shift, the Federal Government is preparing to announce plans to release hundreds of asylum seekers from detention and allow them to live in the community while their applications for asylum are being assessed. The West Australian newspaper is today reporting [...]